Grammatical aspect

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Grammatical categories
Animacy Aspect Case Clusivity Definiteness Degree of comparison Evidentiality Focus Gender Mirativity Modality Mood Noun class Number Person Polarity Tense Topic Transitivity Voice
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In linguistics, the grammatical aspect (sometimes called viewpoint aspect) of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state (in a given situation). Commonly the distinction is in how the speaker views the situation, either as unitary and bounded ("I ate") or as on-going and unbounded ("I was eating"): The distinction here is not in the situation itself, but in the speaker's portrayal of it. Other common aspectual distinctions include whether the situation is repetitive or habitual ("I used to eat") or has continuing relevance ("I have eaten"). Any one language will have at most a subset of the attested aspectual distinctions made in the world's languages.

Aspect can be a difficult concept to convey and understand intuitively. Because they both convey some sense of time, aspect is often confused with the closely-related concept of tense. While tense relates the time of a situation to some other time, commonly the time of speaking, aspect conveys other temporal information, such as duration, completion, or frequency, as it relates to the time of action. Thus tense refers to temporally when while aspect refers to temporally how. Aspect can be said to describe the texture of the time in which a situation occurs, such as a single point of time, a continuous range of time, a sequence of discrete points in time, etc, whereas tense indicates its location in time.

The concept of aspect is best illustrated by example. Consider the following sentences: "I eat", "I am eating", "I have eaten", and "I have been eating". All are to some degree in the present tense, as they describe the present situation, yet each conveys different information or points of view as to how the action pertains to the present. As such, they differ in aspect.

Grammatical aspect is a formal property of a language, distinguished through overt inflection, derivational affixes, or independent words that serve as grammatically required markers of those aspects. For example, the K'iche' language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k- and x- to mark incompletive and completive aspect;^[1][2] Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers -le, -zhe, zài-, and -guo to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects,^[3] and also marks aspect with adverbs;^[4] and English marks the continuous aspect with the verb to be coupled with present participle and the perfect with the verb to have coupled with past participle. Even languages that do not mark aspect morphologically or through auxiliary verbs, however, can convey such distinctions by the use of adverbs or other syntactic constructions.^[5]

Grammatical aspect is distinguished from lexical aspect or aktionsart, which is an inherent feature of verbs or verb phrases and is determined by the nature of the situation that the verb describes.

Grammatical aspect may have been first dealt with in the work of the Indian linguist Yaska (ca. 7th century BCE), who distinguished actions that are processes (bhāva), from those where the action is considered as a completed whole (mūrta). This is the key distinction between the imperfective and perfective. Yaska also applies this distinction to a verb versus an action nominal.

Contents 1 Common aspectual distinctions 2 Aspect vs. tense 3 Lexical vs. grammatical aspect 4 Usage of aspects 5 Aspect by language 5.1 English 5.2 Slavic languages 5.3 Baltic languages 5.4 Romance languages 5.5 Finnic languages 5.6 Philippine languages 5.7 Hawaiian 5.8 Creole languages 5.9 American Sign Languages 6 Terms for various aspects 7 See also 8 Notes 9 Other references 10 External links

[edit] Common aspectual distinctions

The most fundamental aspectual distinction, represented in many languages, is between perfective aspect and imperfective aspect. This is the basic aspectual distinction in the Slavic languages. It semantically corresponds to the distinction between the tenses known respectively as the aorist and imperfect in Greek, the preterite and imperfect in Spanish, the simple past (passé simple) and imperfect in French, and the perfect and imperfect in Latin (from the Latin "perfectus", meaning "completed"). Essentially, the perfective aspect looks at an event as a complete action, while the imperfective aspect views an event as the process of unfolding or a repeated or habitual event (thus corresponding to the progressive/continuous aspect for events of short-term duration and to habitual aspect for longer terms). For events of short durations in the past, the distinction often coincides with the distinction in the English language between the simple past "X-ed," as compared to the progressive "was X-ing" (compare "I wrote the letters this morning" (i.e. finished writing the letters: an action completed) and "I was writing letters this morning"). In describing longer time periods, English needs context to maintain the distinction between the habitual ("I called him often in the past" - a habit that has no point of completion) and perfective ("I called him once" - an action completed), although the construct "used to" is a marker for both habitual aspect and past tense and can be used if the aspectual distinction otherwise is not clear. Sometimes, English has a lexical distinction where other languages may use the distinction in grammatical aspect. For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as a "completed action") correspond to the imperfect and perfect of the French verb "savoir".

[edit] Aspect vs. tense

Aspect is a somewhat difficult concept to grasp for the speakers of most modern Germanic languages, because they tend to conflate the concept of aspect with the concept of tense. Although English largely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutral, progressive, perfect and progressive perfect) do not correspond very closely to the distinction of perfective vs. imperfective that is found in most languages with aspect. Furthermore, the separation of tense and aspect in English is not maintained rigidly. One instance of this is the alternation, in some forms of English, between sentences such as "Have you eaten yet?" and "Did you eat yet?". Another is in the pluperfect ("I had eaten"), which sometimes represents the combination of past tense and perfect ("I was full because I had already eaten"), but sometimes simply represents a past action that is anterior to another past action ("A little while after I had eaten, my friend arrived"). (The latter situation is often represented in other languages by a simple perfective tense. Formal Spanish and French use a past anterior tense in cases such as this.)

Like tense, aspect is a way that verbs represent time. However, rather than locating an event or state in time, the way tense does, aspect describes "the internal temporal constituency of a situation", or in other words, aspect is a way "of conceiving the flow of the process itself".^[6] English aspectual distinctions in the past tense include "I went, I used to go, I was going, I had gone"; in the present tense "I lose, I am losing, I have lost, I have been losing, I am going to lose"; and with the future modal "I will see, I will be seeing, I will have seen". What distinguishes these aspects within each tense is not (necessarily) when the event occurs, but how the time in which it occurs is viewed: As complete, ongoing, consequential, planned, etc.

In most dialects of Ancient Greek, aspect is indicated uniquely by tense. For example, the very frequently used aorist, though a functional preterite in the indicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspect in the subjunctive and optative. The perfect in all moods is used as an aspectual marker, conveying the sense of a resultant state. E.g. ὁράω - I see (present); εἶδον - I saw (aorist); οἶδα - I am in a state of having seen = I know (perfect).

Many Sino-Tibetan languages, like Mandarin, lack grammatical tense but are rich in aspect.

[edit] Lexical vs. grammatical aspect

It is extremely important to distinguish between grammatical aspect, as described here, and lexical aspect. Lexical aspect is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and is not marked formally in most languages. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect, usually relating to situation aspect rather than viewpoint aspect. Typical distinctions are between states ("I owned"), activities ("I shopped"), accomplishments ("I painted a picture"), achievements ("I bought"), and punctual, or semelfactive, events ("I sneezed"). These distinctions are often relevant syntactically. For example, states and activities, but not usually achievements, can be used with a prepositional for-phrase describing a time duration: "I had a car for five hours", "I shopped for five hours", but not "*I bought a car for five hours". Lexical aspect is sometimes called Aktionsart, especially by German and Slavic linguists. Lexical or situation aspect is marked in Athabaskan languages.

One of the factors in situation aspect is telicity. Telicity might be considered a kind of lexical aspect, except that it is typically not a property of a verb in isolation, but rather a property of an entire verb phrase. Achievements and accomplishments have telic situation aspect, while states, activities and semelfactives have atelic situation aspect.

The other factor in situation aspect is duration, which is also a property of a verb phrase. Accomplishments, states, and activities have duration, while achievements and semelfactives do not.

[edit] Usage of aspects

In some languages, aspect and time are very clearly separated, making them much more distinct to their speakers. There are a number of languages that mark aspect much more saliently than time. Prominent in this category are Chinese and American Sign Language, which both differentiate many aspects but rely exclusively on optional time-indicating terms to pinpoint an action with respect to time. In other language groups, for example in most modern Indo-European languages (except Slavic languages), aspect has become almost entirely conflated, in the tense system, with time.

In Russian, aspect is more salient than tense in narrative. Russian, like other Slavic languages, uses different lexical entries for the different aspects, whereas other languages mark them morphologically, and still others with auxiliaries (e.g., English).

In literary Arabic (الفصحى, al-Fusha) the verb has two aspect-tenses: perfective (past), and imperfective (non-past). There is some disagreement among grammarians whether to view the distinction as a distinction in aspect, or tense, or both. The "Past Verb" (فعل ماضي, fi'l maadiy) denotes an event (حدث, hadath) completed in the past, but says nothing about the relation of this past event to present status. For example, "وصل", wasala, "he arrived", indicates that arrival occurred in the past without saying anything about the present status of the arriver - maybe he stuck around, maybe he turned around and left, etc. - nor about the aspect of the past event except insofar as completeness can be considered aspectual. This "Past Verb" is clearly similar if not identical to the Greek Aorist, which is considered a tense but is more of an aspect marker. In the Arabic, aorist aspect is the logical consequence of past tense. By contrast, the "Verb of Similarity" (فعل المضارع, fi'l al-mudaara'ah), so called because of its resemblance to the active participial noun, is considered to denote an event in the present or future without committing to a specific aspectual sense beyond the incompleteness implied by the tense: يضرب "yadribu", he strikes/is striking/will strike/etc. Those are the only two "tenses" in Arabic (not counting "أمر"، "amr", command, which the tradition counts as denoting future events.) At least that's the way the tradition sees it. To explicitly mark aspect, Arabic uses a variety of lexical and syntactic devices.

Contemporary Arabic dialects are another matter. One major change from al-Fusha is the use of a prefix particle (ب "bi" in most dialects) to explicitly mark progressive, continuous, or habitual aspect: بيكتب, bi-yiktib, he is now writing, writes all the time, etc.

Aspect can mark the stage of an action. The prospective aspect is a combination of tense and aspect that indicates the action is in preparation to take place. The inceptive aspect identifies the beginning stage of an action (e.g. Esperanto uses ek-, e.g. Mi ekmanĝas, "I am beginning to eat.") and inchoative and ingressive aspects identify a change of state (The flowers started blooming) or the start of an action (He started running). Aspects of stage continue through progressive, pausative, resumptive, cessive, and terminative.

Important qualifications:

• Although the perfective is often thought of as representing a "momentary action", this is not strictly correct. It can equally well be used for an action that took time, as long as it is conceived of as a unit, with a clearly defined start and end, such as "Last summer I visited France".
• Grammatical aspect represents a formal distinction encoded in the grammar of a language. Although languages that are described as having imperfective and perfective aspects agree in most cases in their use of these aspects, no two languages agree in every situation. For example:
  • Some languages have additional grammatical aspects. Spanish and Ancient Greek, for example, have a perfect (not the same as the perfective), which refers to a state resulting from a previous action (also described as a previous action with relevance to a particular time, or a previous action viewed from the perspective of a later time). This corresponds (roughly) to the "have X-ed" construction in English, as in "I have recently eaten". Languages that lack this aspect (such as Portuguese, which is closely related to Spanish) often use the past perfective to render the present perfect (compare the roughly synonymous English sentences "Have you eaten yet?" and "Did you eat yet?").
  • In some languages, the formal representation of aspect is optional, and can be omitted when the aspect is clear from context or does not need to be emphasized. This is the case, for example, in Mandarin Chinese, with the perfective suffix le and (especially) the imperfective zhe.
  • For some verbs in some languages, the difference between perfective and imperfective conveys an additional meaning difference; in such cases, the two aspects are typically translated using separate verbs in English. In Greek, for example, the imperfective sometimes adds the notion of "try to do something" (the so-called conative imperfect); hence the same verb, in the imperfective (present or imperfect) and aorist, respectively, is used to convey look and see, search and find, listen and hear. (For example, ηκουομεν ēkouomen "we listened" vs. ηκουσαμεν ēkousamen "we heard".) Spanish has similar pairs for certain verbs, such as (imperfect and preterite, respectively) sabía "I knew" vs. supe "I found out", podía "I was able to" vs. pude "I succeeded (in doing something)", quería "I wanted to" vs. quise "I tried to", no quería "I did not want to" vs. no quise "I refused (to do something)". Such differences are often highly language-specific.

[edit] Aspect by language

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[edit] English

The English tense-aspect system has two morphologically distinct tenses, present and past. No marker of a future tense exists on the verb in English; the futurity of an event may be expressed through the use of the auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall", by a present form, as in "tomorrow we go to Newark", or by some other means. Past is distinguished from present-future, in contrast, with internal modifications of the verb. These two tenses may be modified further for progressive aspect (also called continuous aspect), for the perfect, or for both. These two aspectual forms are also referred to as BE +ING^[7] and HAVE +EN,^[8] respectively, which avoids what may be unfamiliar terminology.

Aspects of the present tense:

• Present simple (not progressive, not perfect): "I eat"
• Present progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I am eating"
• Present perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I have eaten"
• Present perfect progressive (progressive, perfect): "I have been eating"

Aspects of the past tense:

• Past simple (not progressive, not perfect): "I ate"
• Past progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I was eating"
• Past perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I had eaten"
• Past perfect progressive (progressive, perfect): "I had been eating"

(While many elementary discussions of English grammar classify the present perfect as a past tense, it relates the action to the present time. One cannot say of someone now deceased that he "has eaten" or "has been eating"; the present auxiliary implies that he is in some way present (alive), even if the action denoted is completed (perfect) or partially completed (progressive perfect).)

The uses of these two aspects are quite complex. They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker:

I was walking down the road when I met Michael Jackson's lawyer. (Speaker viewpoint in middle of action)

I have traveled widely, but I have never been to Moscow. (Speaker viewpoint at end of action)

But they can have other meanings:

You are being stupid now. (You are doing it deliberately)

You are not having chocolate with your sausages! (I forbid it)

I am having lunch with Mike tomorrow. (It is decided)

English expresses a couple other aspectual distinctions with other constructions. Used to + VERB is a past habitual, as in "I used to go to school", and going to / gonna + VERB is a prospective, a future situation highlighting current intention or expectation, as in "I'm gonna go to school next year".

Note that the aspectual systems of certain dialects of English, such as African-American Vernacular English (see for example habitual be), and of creoles based on English vocabulary, such as Hawaiian Creole English, are quite different from those of standard English, and often distinguish aspect at the expense of tense.

[edit] Slavic languages

It has been suggested that this section be split into a new article titled Grammatical aspect in Slavic languages. (Discuss)

In Slavic languages, only one nearly universal type of aspectual opposition forms two grammatical aspects: perfective and imperfective (in contrast with English, which has two aspectual oppositions: perfect vs. neutral and progressive vs. nonprogressive). The aspectual distinctions exist on the lexical level - there is no unique method to form a perfective verb from a given imperfective one (or conversely). Perfective verbs are most often formed by means of prefixes, changes in the root, or using a completely different root (suppletion). Note, however, that possessing a prefix does not necessarily mean that a verb is perfective. Contrast between a perfective and an imperfective verb may be also indicated by stress, e.g. Russian perfective осы́пать, imperfective осыпа́ть (to strew, shower, heap upon sth.).

With a few exceptions each Slavic verb is either perfective or imperfective. Most verbs form strict pairs of one perfective and one imperfective verb with generally the same meaning. However, each Slavic language contains a number of bi-aspectual verbs, which as both imperfective and perfective. They are mainly borrowings from non-Slavic languages, but some native verbs also belong to this group. As opposed to them, mono-aspectual verbs are mainly native. There are mono-aspectual imperfective verbs without perfective equivalents (among others, verbs with the meaning 'to be' and 'to have') as well as perfective verbs without imperfective equivalents (for instance, verbs with the meaning 'become ...', e.g. 'to become paralyzed', etc.).

The perfective aspect allows the speaker to describe the action as finished, completed, finished in the natural way. The imperfective aspect does not present the action as finished, but rather as pending or ongoing.

An example is the verb 'to eat' in the Serbo-Croatian language. The verb translates either as jesti (imperfective) or pojesti (perfective). Now, both aspects could be used in the same tense of Serbian. For example (omitting, for simplicity, feminine forms like jela):

Serbo-Croatian

Example	Tense	Aspect
Ja sam jeo/ Ja сaм јеo	past	imperfective
Ja sam pojeo/ Ja сaм појеo		perfective
Ja sam bio jeo/ Ja сaм био jeo	pluperfect	imperfective
Ja sam bio pojeo/ Ja сaм био појеo		perfective
Ja ću jesti/ Ja ћy jecти	future	imperfective
Ja ću pojesti/ Ja ћy пojecти		perfective

Ja sam pojeo signals that the action was completed. Its meaning can be given as "I ate (something) and I finished eating (it)"; or "I ate (something) up".

Ja sam jeo signals that the action took place (at a specified moment, or in the course of one's life, or every day, etc.); it may mean "I was eating", "I ate" or "I have been eating".

The following examples are from Polish.

Imperfective verbs mean:

• actions in progress, just ongoing states and activities, with significant course (in opinion of the speaker);
• activities posing the background for other (perfective) activities, ex. czytałem książkę, gdy zadzwonił telefon 'I was reading the book when the telephone rang';
• simultaneous activities, ex. będę czytać książkę, podczas gdy brat będzie pisać list 'I will be reading the book while brother will be writing the letter';
• durative activities, lasting through some time, e.g. krzyczał 'he was shouting', będzie drgać 'it will be vibrating';
• motions without a strict aim, ex. chodzę 'I am walking here and there';
• multiple (iterative) activities, ex. dopisywać 'to insert many times to the text', będziemy wychodziły 'we will go out (many times)';
• non-resultative activities, only heading towards some purpose: będę pisał list 'I will be writing the letter';
• continuous states, ex. będę stać 'I will be standing'.

Perfective verbs mean past or future, but not present activities – an activity happening now cannot be ended, so it cannot be perfective. Perfective verbs mean:

• states and activities that were ended (even if a second ago) or will be ended, with insignificant course, short or treated as a whole by the speaker, ex. krzyknął 'he shouted', drgnie 'it will stir';
• single-time activities, ex. dopisać 'to insert to the text', wyszedł 'he has gone out';
• actions whose goals have already been achieved, even if with difficulty, ex. przeczytałem 'I have read', doczytała się 'she finished reading and found what she had sought';
• reasons for the state, ex. pokochała 'she came to love', zrozumiesz 'you (sg.) will understand', poznamy 'we will get to know';
• the beginning of the activity or the state, ex. wstanę 'I will stand up' (and I will stand), zaczerwienił się 'he reddened';
• the end of the activity or the state, ex. dośpiewaj 'sing until the end';
• activities executed in many places, on many objects or by many subjects at the same time, ex. powynosił 'he carried out (many things)', popękają 'They will break out in many places', poucinać 'To cut off many items';
• actions or states that last some time, ex. postoję 'I will stand for a little time', pobył 'he was (there) for some time'.

Most simple Polish verbs are imperfective (the same in other Slavic languages), ex. iść 'to walk, to go', nieść 'to carry', pisać 'to write'. But there are also few simple perfective verbs, ex. dać 'to give', siąść 'to sit down'. There exist many perfective verbs with suffixes and without prefixes, ex. krzyknąć 'to shout', kupić 'to buy' (cf. the imperfective kupować with a different suffix).

Numerous perfective verbs are formed from simple imperfectives by prefixation. To create the perfective counterpart, verbs use various prefixes without any clear rules. The actual prefix can even depend on a dialect or special meaning, ex. the perfective counterpart to malować is pomalować when it means 'to paint a wall; to fill with a color', or namalować when it means 'to paint a picture; to depict sth/sb'.

Besides the strict perfective equivalent, a number of other prefixed verbs may be formed from a given simple imperfective verb. They all have similar but distinct meaning. And they form, as a rule, their own imperfective equivalents by means of suffixation (attaching suffixes) or stem alternation. Example:

• prać 'to wash / clean clothes with water and soap / washing powder' is a simple imperfective verb;
• uprać is its perfective counterpart while doprać, przeprać, oprać are other derived perfective verbs with a little different meanings;
• dopierać, przepierać, opierać are secondary imperfective verbs that are counterparts for doprać, przeprać, oprać respectively; *upierać does not exist because the basic verb prać is the imperfective counterpart of uprać.

A number of verbs form their aspectual counterparts by simultaneous prefixation and suffixation or by suppletion, ex. (the first one is imperfective) stawiać - postawić 'to set up', brać - wziąć 'to take', widzieć - zobaczyć 'to see'.

Special imperfective verbs express aimless motions. They are mono-aspectual, i.e., they have no perfective equivalents. They are formed from other imperfective verbs by stem alternations or suppletion, ex. nosić 'to carry around' (from nieść), chodzić 'to walk around, to go around' (from iść 'to go, to walk'). However, when such a verb gets an aim anyway, it becomes iterative: chodzić do szkoły 'to go to school'.

Other iteratives build another group of mono-aspectual imperfective verbs. They are formed from other imperfective verbs, including the previous group: chadzać 'to walk around usually (from chodzić), jadać 'to eat usually' (from jeść 'to eat'). Both groups are not too numerous: most Polish verbs cannot form iterative counterparts.

Perfective verbs that express activities executed in many places, on many objects, or by many subjects at the same time, and those that express actions or states that last some time, have no imperfective counterparts. They are formed with the prefix po- (which can have other functions as well).

States and activities that last for some time can be expressed by means of both imperfective and perfective verbs: cały dzień leżał w łóżku 'he was in bed all day long' (literally: 'he lay in bed') means nearly the same as cały dzień przeleżał w łóżku. The difference is mainly stylistic: imperfective is neutral here, while using perfective causes stronger tone of the statement.

Aspect in Slavic is a superior category in relation to tense or mood. Particularly, some verbal forms (like infinitive) cannot distinguish tense but they still distinguish aspect. Here is the list of Polish verb forms formed by both imperfective and perfective verbs (such a list is similar in other Slavic languages). The example is an imperfective and a perfective Polish verb with the meaning 'to write'. All personal forms are given in third person, masculine singular, with Russian analog:

• Infinitive: pisać - napisać / писать - написать
• Passive participle: pisany - napisany / писаный - написанный
• Gerund: pisanie - napisanie / писание - написание
• Past impersonal form: pisano - napisano / писано - написано
• Past impersonal form in subjunctive: pisano by - napisano by / not exists
• Past tense: pisał - napisał / писал - написал
• Future tense: będzie pisać / będzie pisał - napisze / будет писать - напишет
• Conditional, first form: pisałby - napisałby / писал бы - написал бы
• Conditional, second form: byłby pisał - byłby napisał / not exists
• Imperative: pisz - napisz / пиши - напиши

The following may be formed only if the verb is imperfective:

• Contemporary adverbial participle – pisząc / not exists, but usually does
• Active participle – piszący / пишущий
• Present tense – pisze / пишет

One form may be created only if the verb is perfective, namely:

• Anterior adverbial participle – napisawszy / написав

[edit] Baltic languages

This section requires expansion.

[edit] Romance languages

Most modern Romance languages merge the concept of aspect and tense, but consistently distinguish perfective and imperfective aspects in past and future tenses. This is a direct derivation of the way the Latin language used to render both aspects and consecutio temporum.

Italian language example(verb mangiare, to eat)

Mood: indicativo (indicative)

• Presente (present): io mangio ("I eat", "I'm eating") - merges habitual and continuous aspects, among others
• Passato prossimo (recent past): io ho mangiato ("I ate", "I have eaten") - merges perfective and perfect

• Imperfetto (imperfect): io mangiavo ("I was eating", or "I usually ate") - merges habitual and progressive aspects
• Trapassato prossimo (recent pluperfect): io avevo mangiato ("I had eaten") - tense, not ordinarily marked for aspect

• Passato remoto (far past): io mangiai (I "ate") - perfective aspect
• Trapassato remoto (far pluperfect): io ebbi mangiato ("I had eaten") - tense

• Futuro semplice (simple future): io mangerò ("I shall eat") - imperfective aspect
• Futuro anteriore (future perfect): io avrò mangiato ("I shall have eaten") - perfective aspect

The difference between the imperfetto/trapassato prossimo and the passato remoto/trapassato remoto is that imperfetto renders an imperfective (continuous) past; passato remoto renders an aorist (punctual/historical) past.

Other aspects in Italian are rendered with other periphrases, like prospective (io sto per mangiare "I'm about to eat", io starò per mangiare "I shall be about to eat"), or continuous/progressive (io sto mangiando "I'm eating", io starò mangiando "I shall be eating").

[edit] Finnic languages

Finnish and Estonian, among others, have a grammatical aspect contrast of telicity between telic and atelic. Telic sentences signal that the intended goal of an action is achieved. Atelic sentences do not signal whether any such goal has been achieved. The aspect is indicated by the case of the object: accusative is telic and partitive is atelic. For example, the (implicit) purpose of shooting is to kill, such that:

• Ammuin karhun -- "I shot the bear (succeeded it is done)" i.e., "I shot the bear dead".
• Ammuin karhua -- "I shot at the bear" i.e., "I shot the bear (and I am not telling if it died)".

Sometimes, corresponding telic and atelic forms have as little to do with each other semantically as "take" has with "take off". For example, naida means "to marry" when telic, but "to have sex with" when atelic.

Also, derivational suffixes exist for various aspects. Examples:

• -ahta- "do suddenly by itself" as in ammahtaa "to shoot up" from ampua "to shoot"
• -ele- "repeatedly" as in ammuskella "to go shooting around"

There are derivational suffixes for verbs, which carry frequentative, momentane, causative, and inchoative aspect meanings also, pairs of verbs differing only in transitivity exist.

[edit] Philippine languages

Like many Austronesian languages, the Verbs of the Philippine languages follow a complex system of affixes in order to express subtle changes in meaning. However, the verbs in this family of languages are conjugated to express the aspects and not the tenses. Though many of the Philippine languages do not have a fully codified grammar, most of them follow the verb aspects that are demonstrated by Filipino or Tagalog.

[edit] Hawaiian

The Hawaiian language conveys aspect as follows:^[9][10][11]

• The unmarked verb, frequently used, can indicate habitual aspect or perfective aspect in the past.

• ke + verb + nei is frequently used and conveys the progressive aspect in the present.

• e + verb + ana conveys the progressive aspect in any tense.

• ua + verb conveys the perfective aspect but is frequently omitted.

[edit] Creole languages

In Creole languages,^[12] the unmarked verb is typically used either for timeless habitual aspect, for stative aspect, or for perfective aspect in the past. Invariant pre-verbal markers are often used. Non-stative verbs typically can optionally be marked for the progressive, habitual, completive, or irrealis aspect. The progressive in English-based Atlantic Creoles often uses de (from English "be"). Jamaican Creole uses pan (from English "upon") for the present progressive and wa (from English "was") for the past progressive. Haitian Creole uses the progressive marker ap. Some Atlantic Creoles use one marker for both the habitual and progressive aspects. In Tok Pisin, the optional progressive marker follows the verb. Completive markers tend to come from superstrate words like "done" or "finish", and some creoles model the future/irrealis marker on the superstrate word for "go".

[edit] American Sign Languages

American Sign Language (ASL) is similar to many other sign languages in that it has no grammatical tense but many verbal aspects produced by modifying the base verb sign.

An example is illustrated with the verb TELL. The basic form of this sign is produced with the initial posture of the index finger on the chin, followed by a movement of the hand and finger tip toward the indirect object (the recipient of the telling). Inflected into the unrealized inceptive aspect ('to be just about to tell'), the sign begins with the hand moving from in front of the trunk in an arc to the initial posture of the base sign (i.e. index finger touching the chin) while inhaling through the mouth, dropping of the jaw, directing eye gaze toward the verb's object. The posture is then held rather than moved toward the indirect object. During the hold, the signer also stops the breath by closing the glottis. Other verbs (such as 'look at', 'wash the dishes', 'yell', 'flirt') are inflected into the unrealized inceptive aspect similarly: the hands used in the base sign move in an arc from in front of the trunk to the initial posture of the underlying verb sign while inhaling, dropping the jaw, and directing eye gaze toward the verb's object (if any), but subsequent movements and postures are dropped as the posture and breath are held.

Other aspects in ASL include the following: stative, inchoative ("to begin to..."), predisposional ("to prone to..."), susceptative ("to... easily"), frequentative ("to... often"), protractive ("to... continuously"), incessant ("to... incessantly"), durative ("to... for a long time"), iterative ("to... over and over again"), intensive ("to... very much"), resultative ("to... completely"), approximative ("to... somewhat"), semblitive ("to appear to..."), increasing ("to... more and more"). Some aspects combine with others to create yet finer distinctions.

Aspect is unusual in ASL in that transitive verbs derived for aspect lose their grammatical transitivity. They remain semantically transitive, typically assuming an object made prominent using a topic marker or mentioned in a previous sentence. See Syntax in ASL for details.

[edit] Terms for various aspects

The following aspectual terms are found in the literature. Approximate English equivalents are given.

• Perfective: 'I struck the bell.' (a unitary event)
• Momentane: 'The mouse squeaked once.' (contrasted to 'The mouse squeaked/was squeaking.')
• Perfect (a common conflation of aspect and tense): 'I have arrived.' (brings attention to the consequences of a situation in the past)
  • Recent perfect ~ after perfect: 'I just ate' OR: 'I am after eating." (Hiberno-English)
• Prospective (a conflation of aspect and tense): 'I am about to eat', 'I am going to eat." (brings attention to the anticipation of a future situation)
• Imperfective (an unfinished action, combines the meanings of both the progressive and the habitual aspects): 'I am walking to work' (progressive) or 'I walk to work every day' (habitual).
• Progressive ~ continuous: 'I am eating.' (action is in progress; a subtype of imperfective)
• Habitual: 'I used to walk home from work', 'I would walk home from work.' (past habitual) (a subtype of imperfective)
• Continuative: 'I am still eating.'
• Inceptive ~ inchoative: 'I fell in love'
• Terminative ~ cessative: 'I finished my meal.'
• Defective : 'I almost fell.'
• Pausative: 'I stopped working for a while.'
• Resumptive: 'I resumed sleeping.'
• Punctual: 'I slept.'
• Durative: 'I slept and slept.'
• Delimitative: 'I slept for an hour.'
• Protractive: 'The argument went on and on.'
• Iterative: 'I read the same books again and again.'
• Frequentative: 'It sparkled', contrasted with 'It sparked'. Or, 'I run around', vs. 'I run'.
• Experiential: 'I have gone to school many times.'
• Intentional: 'I listened carefully.'
• Accidental: 'I knocked over the chair.'
• Generic (generic mood or gnomic tense): 'Mangoes grow on trees.'
• Intensive: 'It glared.'
• Moderative: 'It shone.'
• Attenuative: 'It glimmered.'

[edit] See also

• Aktionsart
• Ancient Greek grammar: Dependence of moods and tenses
• Grammatical conjugation
• Grammatical tense
• Grammatical mood
• Tense-aspect-mood

[edit] Notes

[edit] Other references

• Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (ISBN 0-415-20319-8), by Hadumod Bussmann, edited by Gregory P. Trauth and Kerstin Kazzazi, Routledge, London 1996. Translation of German Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1990.
• Morfofonologian harjoituksia, Lauri Carlson

• Bache, C. (1982). Aspect and Aktionsart: Towards a semantic distinction. Journal of Linguistics, 18(01), 57-72.
• Berdinetto, P. M., & Delfitto, D. (2000). Aspect vs. Actionality: Some reasons for keeping them apart. In O. Dahl (Ed.), Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe (pp. 189–226). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Binnick, R. I. (1991). Time and the verb: A guide to tense and aspect. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Binnick, R. I. (2006). Aspect and Aspectuality. In B. Aarts & A. M. S. McMahon (Eds.), The Handbook of English Linguistics (pp. 244–268). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
• Chertkova, M. Y. (2004). Vid or Aspect? On the Typology of a Slavic and Romance Category [Using Russian and Spanish Material]. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, Filologiya, 58(9-1), 97-122.
• Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Frawley, W. (1992). Linguistic semantics. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Kortmann, B. (1991). The Triad "Tense-Aspect-Aktionsart". Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 6, 9-30.
• MacDonald, J. E. (2008). The syntactic nature of inner aspect: A minimalist perspective. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co.
• Maslov, I. S. (1998). Vid glagol'nyj [Aspect of the verb]. In V. N. Yartseva (Ed.), Jazykoznanie: Bol'shoj entsyklopedicheskij slovar' (pp. 83–84). Moscow: Bol'shaja Rossijskaja Entsyklopedija.
• Richardson, K. (2007). Case and aspect in Slavic. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
• Sasse, H.-J. (2002). Recent activity in the theory of aspect: Accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state? Linguistic Typology, 6(2), 199-271.
• Sasse, H.-J. (2006). Aspect and Aktionsart. In E. K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (Vol. 1, pp. 535–538). Boston: Elsevier.
• Smith, C. S. (1991). The parameter of aspect. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Tatevosov, S. (2002). The parameter of actionality. Linguistic Typology, 6(3), 317-401.
• Travis, L. (in preparation). Inner aspect.
• Verkuyl, H. (2005). How (in-)sensitive is tense to aspectual information? In B. Hollebrandse, A. van Hout & C. Vet (Eds.), Crosslinguistic views on tense, aspect and modality (pp. 145–169). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• Zalizniak, A. A., & Shmelev, A. D. (2000). Vvedenie v russkuiu aspektologiiu [Introduction to Russian aspectology]. Moskva: IAzyki russkoi kul’tury.

[edit] External links

• TAMPA: Aspect Explained
• Robert Binnick annotated tense/aspect bibliography (around 9000 entries)
• Anna Katarzyna Młynarczyk: Aspectual Pairing in Polish, a pdf version of the book
• Grammar Tutorials - a column overview of the English tenses
• Greek tenses
• Verb Aspect

v • d • e Grammatical and lexical aspects Complete vs. incomplete Perfective/Aorist (Momentane) • Imperfective (Continuous and progressive • Iterative and distributive/Frequentative#) Beginning vs. ending Inchoative aspect/verb# • Cessative Consequences Perfect #Lexical aspects. Grammatical aspects unmarked.